The continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a decline in people's subjective well-being and emotional states. Digital travel based on 360° videos provides an alternate way for people to improve their mental health at home during this specific period. Yet, how to construct effective digital travel content that improves emotions remains an issue. This investigation assessed the impact of people's perceived presence and sense of place (SOP) on emotional improvement during a 360° digital travel experience. A total of 156 undergraduate students volunteered to participate, and anxiety, emotion levels, and life satisfaction were measured before and after the digital travel experience; presence and SOP ratings were also collected after the experience. A Latent Change Score model was then developed, and the results indicated that the greater presence and SOP individuals experienced during their digital travel, the better their digital travel experience and emotional improvement. Furthermore, the current data highlight that SOP has a greater impact on emotional improvement than presence. This result provides a novel understanding that how SOP is generated may be more critical to digital travel than presence. This new understanding should help improve relevant applications in the field of digital travel, such as the possibility of providing meaningful narrative context in a virtual environment to induce SOP more effectively, and improve the digital travel experience. Overall, the findings of this study expand our understanding of the digital travel experience and lay the groundwork for future research on SOP and digital travel.

中文翻译：

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在 COVID-19 大流行期间，360° 数字旅行可改善情绪状态和幸福感：存在感和场所感的作用。

COVID-19大流行的持续导致人们主观幸福感和情绪状态下降。基于360°视频的数字旅行为人们在这一特定时期改善居家心理健康提供了另一种方式。然而，如何构建有效的数字旅游内容来改善情绪仍然是一个问题。这项调查评估了人们在 360° 数字旅行体验中的感知存在感和地方感 (SOP) 对情绪改善的影响。共有156名本科生自愿参与，测量数字旅行体验前后的焦虑、情绪水平和生活满意度；体验结束后还收集了存在感和 SOP 评级。随后开发了潜在变化评分模型，结果表明，个人在数字旅行期间体验到的存在感和 SOP 越多，他们的数字旅行体验和情绪改善就越好。此外，目前的数据表明，SOP 对情绪改善的影响比存在感更大。这一结果提供了一种新颖的认识，即 SOP 的生成方式对于数字旅行而言可能比存在更重要。这种新的理解应该有助于改进数字旅行领域的相关应用，例如在虚拟环境中提供有意义的叙事上下文以更有效地诱导SOP的可能性，并改善数字旅行体验。总的来说，这项研究的结果拓展了我们对数字旅行体验的理解，并为未来 SOP 和数字旅行的研究奠定了基础。